“Just leave me alone,” she said, letting her copper hair fall before her face to hide him from view.
“So why do you think the light won’t take us?” asked Nick.
“It will take me,” Mary confessed. Then she held up her hand, showing that it was cuffed to the door handle of the car she sat beside. “But I won’t go.”
Nick looked around on the ground until he spotted the key, then he knelt beside Mary, undoing the cuffs and setting her free.
“I’ve loved you for a very long time,” Nick said to her, “in spite of all the bad stuff that’s happened between us. Why do you think that is?”
“I’m not answering your questions, Nick. I have no answers.”
“I’ll tell you why, then. Because you let me see who you could be. Not who you were, not who you became, but who you might become. Which means the Mary I love, in a way, hasn’t even been born yet. But she could be now.”
Mary finally looked up at him, feeling that painful twinge of love that had plagued her for so long. She couldn’t handle that unforgiving feeling alone.
“I want to talk to my brother,” she said. “I want to talk to Mikey.”
“He’s gone,” said a voice behind Nick.
Mary looked past Nick to see that Allie had arrived. Jix was there too, and so were her own skinjackers. They had all heard what Nick said, and were looking at her with a putrid mix of fear and pity. She tried to reach her tendrils of light out to snare them, but realized that the persuasive power she always had, which had grown into a mystical force, was now gone. It had been stolen by the light. All that was left of her afterglow now was a faint luminescence, no more remarkable than anyone else’s.
The Pet spoke without as much as raising his hand. “I’m sorry, Miss Mary,” he said, “but I quit.”
She could see in the rest of their faces that The Pet was speaking for all of them. She turned to Nick, who still waited patiently for an answer to his proposition. “You don’t need to be Mary Hightower anymore,” he said. “You could be Megan Mary McGill . . . all you have to do is accept that you were wrong.”
Mary told him nothing, because there was nothing more to say. Her choices were simple and clear.
“Thank you, Nick,” she said, and she kissed him, allowing herself to savor the moment, and lock it into her memory. Then she turned and walked toward the edge of the deadspot, where the old blue refrigerator stood. She pushed it over, watching it fall backward onto the sands of the living world. In this position it did, indeed, look like a sarcophagus. For the first time she noticed the brand name on the door: Westinghouse. Mary could have laughed, for it occurred to her that this would be the only “West” that she’d be going. She grabbed the heavy latching handle and lifted open the door.
“Mary, no!” said Nick.
But Allie grabbed his arm. “This is her choice.”
Mary knew there wasn’t much time, for the refrigerator had already begun to sink. She took one last look at Everlost, the world that had almost been hers . . . then she stepped inside the cramped, claustrophobic space, and laid down on her side, pulling up her knees so that she could fit.
All you have to do is accept that you were wrong.
For Mary Hightower, there could be no such admission. If she could not be in a world where she was the very definition of right, then she would not be in that world at all. She would rather be in a world of one. And so, as her last act as a citizen of Everlost, Mary Hightower pulled the door down, hearing the latch firmly lock into place, and sealed herself into solitary darkness from now until the end of time.
* * *
Nick could have gone after her and pulled her out before it was too late, but Allie was absolutely right. This was Mary’s choice. The others were already turning their backs, and Nick found himself furious at them. “No!” he yelled, holding back tears. “We will watch this! We will give her the dignity of watching this.”
And so they all stood in a circle around the sarcophagus in silence as it sank slowly into the ground, until the last bit of it disappeared beneath the desert sands on its long, lonely journey into the earth’s unyielding embrace.
PART EIGHT
EverEnding
Paradoxical Interlude with Physicists and Lobstermen
Quantum science says that all that we believe is solid is 99.99 percent empty space. It only seems solid because that’s what our senses are designed to tell us.
Astrophysics says that 27 percent of the universe is dark matter. In other words, stuff that is measurably there, but for some reason no one can see it and no one knows where it is.
Cosmic String Theory says that there aren’t just three dimensions, but that there are actually eleven—but most of them are unable to be perceived from where we sit, no matter how comfortable our chair is.
And in the jagged coastline of Maine, people often have been known to say, “You can’t get there from here,” even when you can see the place right across the inlet.